Web Page Bounce Rate

Should you care what your site's Bounce Rate is?

Bounce Rate is a figure that describes a visitors preference to leave your site or push into another page within the site. The Home page of interfacebus has a bounce rate of 33%, or 33% of the people that find that page click away [2008 figure]. However; a visitor may click onto another site run by interfacebus.com as shown in the attached graphic. For example the lower part of the graphic shows 5 bars that indicate the percentage of people that click on those links [which happen to be hidden under the bars].

The first bar presents people viewing the FAQ page, which happens to be local to the site [0%]. The sitemap used by interfacebus, indicated by the next bar, is located off site and would constitute a bounce [but 0% of visitors viewed it]. The next bar represents this blog, not a local page [5.1%]. The next bar is the blog representing new pages added to the web site [5.1%]. The final bar is a resume but is local.

In addition to those three possible external pages, a person may also use the search bar. The page returned from a search is external to this web site and would also be a bounce, even if they click on another local page returned by the search [5.1%].

So the index page has a 33% bounce rate, but 15% of people just go to another page hosted by this site resulting in an over bounce rate of 15%.

Now the overall bounce rate for the web site is 70% [all pages combined]. Is that bad, I doubt it, seems people find the right page they're looking for on the first search or hit to the site. However going over each page would just be to time consuming.